A haven for the spooky and the geeky

By Susan SuleimanThursday 27 October 2011

With more than 100,000 books, the Eaton Collection at UC
Riverside is the world’s largest public assortment of science fiction, fantasy,
horror and utopian literature. And it is a valuable resource for scholars and
researchers worldwide.

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The old black and white photograph shows a precise-featured man
wearing glasses, a puckish expression and a keffiyeh, headgear straight out of
the costume chest of Lawrence of Arabia. The pipe in his mouth only adds to the
incongruity. Was he dressed for Halloween? A costume party?

Whatever the occasion, it’s hard to avoid the impression that the
late J. Lloyd Eaton having a grand old time.

J. Lloyd Eaton

Eaton, a UC Berkeley alumnus and a doctor in Oakland, Calif., was an
avid collector of science fiction, fantasy, horror and utopian books. But when
Eaton wanted to donate his collection of some 7,500 books in 1969, even iconic
authors such as Jules Verne weren’t regarded as “serious.”Eaton tried several universities before UC Riverside
accepted his donation.

In hindsight, this acquisition looks remarkably prescient. Today
those genres are taken very
seriously indeed. Authors of the first rank, such as John Updike, Margaret
Atwood and Haruki Murakami, have written books about time travel and dystopian
futures.Science fiction has grown from
a nerd’s hobby to a meditation on the nature of existence.

“The 20th century, when science fiction emerges and becomes
popular, is the century when science and technology becomes absolutely central
in everyone’s life,” said Rob Latham, a UC Riverside English professor.“It’s a literature that helps people
understand the future shock they’re living through.”

Over the past 40 years, the Eaton Collection has become the
world’s largest publicly accessible collection of science fiction, fantasy, horror
and utopian literature, and it’s a valuable resource for scholars and
researchers worldwide. Its 100,000 books include a much-prized 1517 edition of
Thomas More’s “Utopia” and first editions of “Dracula” and “Frankenstein.” The
collection also includes 90,000 fanzines, the amateur magazines published by science
fiction aficionados.

The top names in science fiction, including Ray Bradbury. Samuel
R. Delany, Harlan Ellison, Frederik Pohl, Robert Silverberg, Theodore Sturgeon
and Roger Zelazny have attended Eaton conferences at UC Riverside. So have
leading mainstream literary critics such as Leslie Fiedler and Harold
Bloom.

The accolade in Wired recognized the often-overlooked connection
between technological innovation and science fiction, said Nalo Hopkinson, a
Jamaican-born writer of science fiction and fantasy who joined UC Riverside’s
creative writing faculty this fall.

Hopkinson pointed out that Bill Gates and Paul Allen, the
co-founders of Microsoft, were science fiction buffs. British newspaper
columnist Damien Walter recently reported that Chinese authorities have
encouraged the popularity of science fiction, hoping to foster U.S.-style
innovation. But the Chinese authorities got more than they bargained for when
author Chen Guanzhong came up with a cogent
political critique in his novel “The Prosperous Time: China 2013.”

Science fiction has been a powerful tool for social commentary
since the days of “Gulliver’s Travels,”according
to Hopkinson.

“Science fiction and fantasy wrestle with the clash of cultures,
with the way humans change the world around them, and who does the dirty work,”
she said.

Partly because of its usefulness as social criticism, science
fiction has always been an international literary form. Some feel it has a
special role in the U.S., where the naturalistic novel dominates
literature.Science fiction and other
imaginative genres have flourished as a kind of guilty pleasure since the
1960s, when Cold War fears were expressed by novels and popular television
series such as "Star Trek."

In a society where it is increasingly difficult for people to
delve into the unconscious or acknowledge their fears, films like “The Matrix”
give us places to put “all that our civilization represses and oppresses,”
according to the British film critic and horror buff Robert Paul Wood.

Melissa Conway, the Eaton collection’s director, is a Dante
scholar with a Ph.D. in medieval studies from Yale.She sees the role of fantasy and science
fiction as profound.

“The old image of science fiction is long gone,” she says. “When
I came here, I started seeing the links between science fiction and fantasy and
medieval literature. Medieval Christianity offered a structure so the
inscrutable pain of life could be put into a meaningful framework. That’s what
religion does best.In its own way,
science fiction does this, too.”

In recent years, increasing numbers of students have been drawn
to UC Riverside because of the university’s reputation as a place where imaginative
literature is valued. In addition to Latham and Hopkinson, the campus hopes to
add a third professor who specializes in media: film, games, and visual
culture.

Riverside already is a magnet for students interested in the
field, particularly since Hopkinson’s arrival.Her work has earned praise from mainstream sources such as the New York
Times, which listed her second novel, “Midnight Robber,” as a notable book in
2000. But Hopkinson remembers that when she approached another university where
she wanted to study creative writing, she was told that the program didn’t
teach “genre” writing.

“It’s just as easy to have rigorous content and rich fiction in
any genre,” she said. "All fiction is, to
some extent, fantasy. You make it the hell up.”

It’s hard not to think that in an alternate universe somewhere, J.
Lloyd Eaton is chuckling.

(Large photo at top of page is by Vlasta Radan, UC Riverside
Special Collections and Archives)